Emotions

When I was younger, I was quick-tempered. I would react fast, often with intensity, and many times it came out as anger. But deep down, the issue wasn’t just anger, it was pain. I felt deeply misunderstood. The one person who truly understood me was no longer there, and I was surrounded by people who either didn’t understand or didn’t care enough to listen. I didn’t have the tools or the language to express how I felt, so my emotions would erupt as anger, raw, uncontrollable, and overwhelming.

I hated the way it felt. I hated feeling so strongly and not knowing what to do with those emotions. I longed for someone to help me name them, contain them, guide them. But no one was there. So at some point, I made an internal decision: I would stop caring. I would stop feeling anything that could stir up those strong emotions, anything that might provoke anger, confusion, jealousy, division, or frustration. If something felt like it could bring me to that place of emotional chaos, I would shut it down, walk away, or ignore it.

And that worked for a while. As a little girl, that coping mechanism gave me peace. I became the quiet, polite, peaceful child who stayed in her corner. But as I grew older, I kept operating under that same logic: Don’t feel too deeply. Don’t get too attached. Don’t let things matter too much. I made decisions based on emotional survival: “This doesn’t matter,” I’d tell myself. “Let it go. Don’t give it importance, because it will hurt.”

It became so ingrained in me that I lived this way well into my teenage years and my young adulthood, until I met Christ. But what I didn’t realize at the time was that I wasn’t really living, I was shutting myself down from the inside. Because when you stop feeling your emotions, a part of you dies. You don’t just avoid pain, you also lose connection to joy, empathy, creativity, and even love.

When I started walking with Christ, He gently began to show me that this way of living wasn’t His way. He created me to feel, to live fully, to experience the depth of being human. He didn’t ask me to suppress my emotions but to bring them to Him. That was a huge shift for me. Suddenly, I had to feel again. But feeling again didn’t mean I magically knew how to handle emotions. No, when I picked up from where I had left off as a child, I realized I had never truly learned how to manage emotions. So even as an adult, I was struggling with the same confusion and chaos I experienced as a child.

And it was hard. Really hard. I was swinging between emotional highs and lows, completely overwhelmed. There were moments I wanted to go back to the old me, the numb me. It felt safer. Easier. Predictable. And in those moments, I would tell myself: “If by the end of the week this doesn’t get better, I’m done. I’m going back to the old way.”

But every time, God would whisper: “Keep going.”

Something in the Bible spoke directly to my experience. The Israelites. After God delivered them from slavery in Egypt, He led them into the wilderness toward the Promised Land. But in the face of discomfort, uncertainty, and emotional and physical hardship, they longed to go back to Egypt. Back to what was familiar. Back to bondage.

They cried out to Moses, saying, “Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you brought us to the desert to die?” (Exodus 14:11). Every time they faced difficulty, they would say things like, “We were better off in Egypt!” Why? Because Egypt, though painful, was known. Predictable. Structured. Just like my emotional numbness. It was slavery, but it was familiar.

I began to realize that I was doing the same thing. God was leading me into healing, into emotional freedom, into wholeness, but it was messy. And just like the Israelites, I kept looking back at my personal “Egypt” and saying, “At least I knew how to survive there.”

But God doesn’t want us to merely survive. He wants us to thrive, to live fully, and to be transformed. And so, slowly, I started to allow my emotions back in. I began asking myself: “What am I feeling? Why? Where is this coming from?” But most importantly, I began to bring those feelings to God.

“God, I feel this way, why? What is being triggered in me? What’s underneath this? What is the root of this emotion? Expose it so we can heal it.”

Little by little, He started to teach me emotional intelligence, spiritual maturity, and self-control. Not through suppression, but through surrender. He helped me take my emotions captive, not by force, but by love. And I began to see that many of the people who triggered me weren’t always trying to hurt me, they might be broken too. And that realization gave birth to compassion.

Now, I won’t lie to you. I still mess up. Sometimes I still react. Sometimes I’m still quick to anger. But now, I know how to pause. I know how to come back and apologize. I know how to reflect, and most of all, I know how to bring it all to God.

And every time I do, He continues the healing. He brings me back to life. Fully alive. Fully present. Fully human, and fully His.

And you? How do you handle your emotions? Do you suppress them like I used to? Do you act on them and let them take control? Or maybe you use them as fuel to be productive? Because, truth is, all of these options are equally misleading. The first will numb you to death. The second will get you in trouble (Numbers 20:7–12, John 18:10–11). And the last one, which often sounds like the smartest, can be the most toxic. It will unconsciously lead you to seek out negative emotions just to feel inspired or creative, or will give you a false impression that you have processed your emotions. (That last one probably deserves its own article.)

One of the deepest lies we tend to believe is that our emotions define us. We are afraid of who we are because we think our anger are us. Our jealousy are us. Our sadness are us. So if we allow ourselves to feel, we are exposing a version of ourselves that we don’t want others to see. We are convinced that feeling would reveal a monster we need to keep hidden.

But Christ showes us that, We are not our emotions. We are who He says we are.

Emotions don’t define our identity, they are indicators, not dictators. They can guide us to see what’s hurting, what needs healing, what needs boundaries or forgiveness. But they don’t have to control us. And when surrendered to God, they become tools for growth.

Fille d’Epiphaniya